No one person controls Microsoft. The board and the shareholders decide whether they want to have me as CEO.

Well, jobs are a great thing. You have to be a bit careful: If you raise the minimum wage, you’re encouraging labor substitution and you’re going to go buy machines and automate things - or cause jobs to appear outside of that jurisdiction. And so within certain limits, you know, it does cause job destruction. If you really start pushing it, then you’re just making a huge trade-off.

Well-spent aid money is saving lives for a few thousand dollars per life saved.

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.

If something's expensive to develop, and somebody's not going to get paid, it won't get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?

A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity where you sit in an office with the door closed all day and write lots of code.

When I say "an energy miracle," I mean that there will be some form of energy whose 24 hour cost really is competitive with hydrocarbons given, say, 20 years of learning curve. You invent it, then you look at how much its costs go down over the next 20 years, that it really beats hydrocarbons.